1. Field of the Invention
The disclosed apparatus is intended for use in the manufacture of lead acid storage batteries and especially for use automotive storage batteries having side terminals. The side terminal storage battery differs from the normal top terminal post battery in that the electrical connections are made by fastening electrical cables to threaded inserts in one side of the battery instead of clamping them to the positive and negative top posts common to most automotive batteries.
2. Prior Art
The development of the side terminal battery is relatively recent in the field of automotive batteries. As a result, the majority of the equipment utilized in current battery fabrication facilities is primarily adapted to be used with older, more commonly used top terminal batteries. Its application to side terminal battery processing has frequently involved the use of awkward and potentially dangerous adaptors which do not always lend themselves to quality production. To avoid the unnecessary duplication of equipment, or the use of these adaptors, a battery case having a pair of side terminals, each with a temporary integral forming post, similar to that in top terminal batteries was developed. This temporary post-like terminal is used during the battery formation stage of manufacture and is then later removed to be replaced with the threaded inserts normally used. While there have been many attempts in the prior art to remove these temporary side terminals by using milling machines and similar equipment, these were normally constructed to operate either on a single terminal or at least simultaneously on the terminals of a single battery in a discontinuous, manually controlled procedure. The present apparatus is designed to automatically remove the side terminals from a plurality of batteries as a part of an overall manufacturing operation so that both quality and quantity of production are improved.